When she can’t scream anymore, she sits with her back against the bed, chest heaving with sobs she tries to hold back. Her drive for survival fights its way back to the front of her mind, carrying with it clarifying thought and the remains of her plan. She struggles at first, but eventually pushes herself to her feet and begins rifling through the cabinets in the room. While searching, her foot brushes up against a wire. She follows it until she gets to a small room off to the side, a walk-in closet at the center of which stands a Terminal. It’s a smaller domestic model, but it still hums with life. That must be how they did it. Programmed a shutdown sequence and connected it through a landline to their own braincases. She imagines each family member plugging in, then seizing as the sequence sends killer nanobots up and down their neural synapses and they seize, then fall back, dead. And she imagines the remaining family members watching this happen, then following suit themselves. Tears spring anew to her eyes and breath shortens in her lungs, but she pushes away the visions before she collapses again.

The touchboard near the Terminal’s center glows aquamarine, and a brief key sequence calls up the monitor. It still blinks with the kill-sequence commands. Ify shuts that down, sending it back to its normal home screen. When she finds, under the settings, an option for external device repair, a heavy sigh of relief comes. Step one is done.

She makes her way back to the study and goes through the drawers to find styluses and a bottle of adhesive. In the bathroom, amid spilled bottles of medication, she finds rubbing alcohol, gauze, civilian-issue MeTro sealant, and a small flexiglas container inside which sit three drone bees. Perfect. The mirror reflects back to her a face still covered in dried blood and soot, tear streaks turning the blemishes into dried riverbanks that run down her cheeks. She closes her eyes, then finds a towel on the ground. It’s soft and protective around her fist. With a single strike, she shatters the mirror.

Then she bundles her findings—rubbing alcohol, gauze, MeTro sealant, the bees, and shards of mirror—into the towel and sets them down in front of the Terminal. Working fast, she connects the Terminal’s plug into an outlet at the bottom of the bee container, then inputs a sequence in the Terminal that makes the container glow with life. The bees are active.